After a while, I´ve discovered the real problem, the drive has an auto spindown in 15 minutes that cannot be configured. As you leave it unattended it spins down. When you try to reade or write something to the disk, you receive a I/O error, because the filesystem timeouts before the drive starts. When you got i/o errors, the partition is remounted read-only, it can be very bad if you are on you root partition.

It turns out that in my system (and probably yours) is in a different place, wich is:

echo 1 >/sys/class/scsi_disk/0:0:0:0/allow_restart

In my case the drive is connected to port 1 on nslu2 and is the root partition. This parameter must be set after every reboot (or drive reconnect); this init script works for me (note that locating the file to write to using the wildcard won't work with /bin/sh, which is why bash is used):

#!/bin/bash
echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/device/scsi_disk*/allow_restart

Note: the allow_restart parameter is apparently only supported for all hard drives in kernel versions at least 2.6.21. The latest SlugOS kernel (from binary install) is 2.6.16 and as such cannot easily be used with this hard drive at this time.

[ehymel] Note: this fix works for me using kernel version 2.6.18 (uname -r gives 2.6.18-5-ixp4xx).

[llloret] Works for me too with kernel 2.6.18-6-ixp4xx, with a Freeagent 500 Mb.

FWIW, this page doesn't print because of the long URLs? and SUBSYSTEMS lines. There's also a position: absolute in the CSS that is bad news - it limits all printing to a single page, just flowing off the bottom. HTH, Dave

Printing works using the print feature in the top right corner of the page. Scroll all the way to the right.